SAO PAULO.- Mendes Wood DM is presenting the first solo exhibition of the seminal American artist Lynda Benglis at its São Paulo gallery, running from 2 April - 29 May 2022. Benglis has played a groundbreaking role in contemporary art through her innovative use of materials and continued refusal to submit to aesthetic orthodoxies. As the artist explains, "This show is about materials. The material is the question, the work is the answer."
Benglis’s exhibition in São Paulo brings together sculptures in a variety of media from the past 13 years of her career. Drawn from different bodies of work, each group of sculptures reflects Benglis’s interest in material innovation and engagement with movement, light, space, form, and surface.
Art historian and critic Robert Pincus-Witten coined the term "the frozen gesture" to characterise Benglis’s art in his foundational 1974 article on the artist in Artforum. As a young artist working during the rise of Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Process art, Benglis recognized the phrase as a succinct and potent description of her work, one which she has repeated many times over the years. Yet in 1974, "the frozen gesture" took much of its meaning from its artistic context. It conjured Abstract Expressionism, opposed Minimalism, and assumed a theatricality Benglis embraced. With a career that now spans more than five decades, Benglis has transcended that original context through her ongoing explorations of new forms, materials, and ideas. Though gesture remains a fundamental component of her work, in her more recent sculpture "the frozen gesture" may sometimes be unfrozen, multiplied, or otherwise complicated.
The Mendes Wood DM exhibition includes Black Ice, a trio of totem-like stacks of irregular conical vessels. The scale of each form is striking. As they seem to tilt and teeter in a multi-jointed contrapposto, these works hover instead of towering over the viewer, calling to mind a strange, dark, seductive version of the Three Graces from classical Greece. Their rugose surfaces bubble, coil, and cross in constant motion. Earthy evocations of crawfish mounds allude to Benglis’s childhood in Lake Charles, Louisiana, combining with the convolutions of the human brain and the coral Benglis frequently saw while scuba diving. Black Ice refuses to be still in either form or surface.
Benglis may often invoke nature in the shapes and titles of her paper pieces, but she also injects them with some glitz. Whether sparkled with glued glitter or covered in handmade sparkle paper ("cast sparkles” as the artist likes to call it), the contrast between the bone-like tones of handmade paper and the reflective metallic hues of the sparkles points to Benglis’s interest in pairing the organic and the artificial. Silver Pair features two frilly, plant-like stalks that look as if they are about to head to the disco. Combinations of natural and manmade elements have long been central to Benglis’s practice. The artist’s early latex paintings, for example, were made with natural latex rubber mixed with glaringly artificial fluorescent pigment. They recall both the natural flows of bodies of water and the rainbow sheen of the oil slicks that pollute them.
Quoted in Life magazine in 1970, Benglis stated, “I realised that the idea of directing matter logically was absurd. Matter can and will take its own form”. This early acknowledgement of the agency of her materials would direct Benglis’s work for decades to come. The artist welcomes uncertainty with full assurance because she collaborates with her materials instead of controlling them. In the process of each interaction with a new material, there is an openness that comes with maturity, an ability to allow in the sights, textures, and colours of her life, experience, and landscape as a part of the exchange.
